All My Children:
A Lesbian Kiss to Build a Dream On?by
Sarah Warn, April 2003

After days of hype,
we finally saw the first lesbian kiss on daytime television--and it didn't disappoint. The kiss was emotional and sweet (if a little chaste by daytime standards), relevant to the larger storyline, and sympathetic to viewers because the characters in question on
All My Children--Bianca (played by Eden Riegel) and Lena (play by Olga Sosnovska)--are integral characters to the show, and their relationship has been building up to this moment for the last several weeks.

Bianca has been unlucky in love since she came out as a lesbian two years ago, repeatedly falling in love with women who aren't interested or aren't gay (or mysteriously disappear). The most recent object of her affection prior to Lena was her friend Maggie (Elizabeth Hendrickson), which led to the creation of a
BAM (Bianca And Maggie)
a fan group which has lobbied AMC
over the last several months to get Bianca and Maggie together.

In fact, the kiss between Lena and Bianca is partly the result of BAM's efforts, since they made it clear to
AMC
that there was fan support for a lesbian relationship on the show. But when All My Children
finally polled viewers on the subject they found that while there was
overwhelming support for Bianca to have a girlfriend, the majority of fans wanted it to be with someone new (not Maggie).

Enter Lena, a bisexual woman scheming to steal the secret anti-aging formula known only to Bianca's friend Boyd. When Boyd won't give it up, Lena becomes friends with Bianca, hoping to get it out of her--until she unexpectedly begins to fall for Bianca and decides she just can't seduce her and then break her heart.

Instead of telling Bianca the truth, however, Lena decides to leave the country. Tired of being rejected by everyone, Bianca pours her heart out to an old family friend, who advises her to go after Lena, so she does. Bianca finds Lena at the airport and asks her to give their relationship another chance. After several long moments of conversation, in which Bianca tells Lena with tears in her eyes "you touched my heart" and Lena keeps trying to tell Bianca that this isn't about her, Lena slowly starts to crumble and finally grabs Bianca and kisses her. Five seconds later, the episode fades out.

In an 2000 interview
with
The Advocate,
AMC
creator Agnes Nixon attributes the idea for this storyline to reading Chastity Bono's memoir and to Nixon's own experience having a lesbian housemate in college in 1947. Although her first attempt at introducing a new lesbian character to All My Children
in 1983 wasn't very successful (the character only lasted two months), what she learned from that experience, according to Nixon, is that "if you want to do a story about a social issue seriously [on a soap], the character has to be really well integrated.”

So this time around, instead of introducing a new lesbian character,
AMC
chose to bring out a character who was already well-established and well-liked--and who is more integral to the series than Erika Kane's daughter, a girl whom fans had watched grow up under their very eyes over the last sixteen years?

So in 2000, Bianca became the first lesbian teen on daytime television, creating television history with suprisingly little fanfare at the time.

ABC is no stranger to lesbian-related controversy itself--in 1988, the network introduced thefirst recurring lesbian character on primetime TV (Marily McGrath, played by Gail Strickland, and her lover Patti, played by Gina Hecht on
Heartbeats)
and in 1994, ABC weathered a rash of protests and advertiser backlash over Roseanne's kiss with Mariel Hemingway on an episode of
Roseanne
(which several local ABC affiliates refused even to air).

Audience, advertiser, and affiliate reaction was much more mixed in 1997 when the hoopla started around Ellen Degeneres' character coming-out on her ABC sitcom, and by the time ABC aired the first kiss between lesbian/bisexual teenage characters in 2002 (on the drama
Once and Again), there was no negative advertising impact and only one ABC affiliate (in Virginia) refused to air the episode.